FPGA-NN

Neural Networks on FPGA

About

This project aims to develop and evaluate neural networks for FPGAs. The designs are written in the verilog-2005 HDL lenguaje.

Open FPGA development

Given the recent release of the open source Icestorm tools, which allows to program several Lattice's ICE FPGAs, we chose to work only with open tools. The sources from this projects are also open source, licensed under the LGPL License.

FPGA compatibility

The choosen toolchain is compatible with the iCE40 LP1K, LP4K, LP8K, and HX devices. However, some of the tools are compatible with more FPGAs, as is the case of Yosys, which can syntesize code for the Xilinx-7 series; and the verilog code is constrainted to the verilog-2005 standard, so it should be easily ported to most platforms and toolchains.

The following list enumerates the tested FPGA boards:

• izeZUM Alhambra (iCE40HX1K)

Installation of the required tools

The tools used by this project are:

• Verilog synthesis: Yosys
• place&route: Arachne-PNR
• FPGA programming: IceStorm Tools
• compilation and simulation: Icarus
• wave visualization: gtkwave

Of course, as noted in the previous section, different tools could be used.

The following commands, taken mostly from the icestorm webpage (http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/) can be used to install them on an ubuntu machine.

Prerrequisites

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential clang bison flex libreadline-dev \
                     gawk tcl-dev libffi-dev git mercurial graphviz   \
                     xdot pkg-config python python3 libftdi-de

Yosys: Verilog Synthesis

git clone https://github.com/cliffordwolf/yosys.git yosys
cd yosys
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install

Arachne-PNR: Place&Route

git clone https://github.com/cseed/arachne-pnr.git arachne-pnr
cd arachne-pnr
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install

IceStorm: FPGA Programming Tools

git clone https://github.com/cliffordwolf/icestorm.git icestorm
cd icestorm
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install

Icarus: Verilog Compiler and Simulator

sudo apt-get install iverilog

GTKwave: VCD File Waveform Viewer

sudo apt-get install gtkwave

Instructions (TODO)

Compilation and Testing (TODO)

Loading to FPGA (TODO)